“Fuck!”

Robin dashed after the fleeing kid, who barreled down the straight path between buildings at full speed. She nearly ran down Tisha, who appeared from the branching path looking frazzled and concerned.

“Where’s the boy?” she gasped.

“He’s making a run for it.” Robin banked around her, catching a glimpse of the white cape disappearing around a distant corner. “Come on!”

They reached the corner just in time to catch his next turn, and his next, with no time to pause for breath. Robin soon lost track of where they were in the maze. If the kid left the block, they’d lose him for sure; but with the logic of a child he seemed to think that the more turns he took, the more likely he’d be to shake his tail. If they could only keep close until he turned down a dead-end, they’d have him.

“The scanner says he’s only level 8,” said Tisha, panting with the effort of their run. “How’s he doing the light thing?”

“He got lucky. Sometimes the RNG rolls a 1.”

Though the true algorithm was far more complex, roughly speaking, a character’s chance of manifesting their first Beacon-granted Power went by half a percent for every dot in the Power attribute. Even luckier: elemental control, while a fairly common gift, came in 10 varieties, of which light and darkness were the most rare. The kid wasn’t stupid, he’d stumbled into an early power and learned to use it well. But it also made him cocky, and that cockiness would get him hurt.

The rattle of iron around the next corner jarred her into a speed boost. Sure enough, the tight space between two buildings went only a few feet before its dead end, but between that wall and the corner was a New York City-style fire escape. “Lightboy” had rolled a trash can underneath it, climbed up, and jumped to the ladder, which rattled and shook as he scrambled up.

With a jolt, it came loose. The kid grabbed for the first platform, missed, and gasped as the jolt from the ladder dislodged him. He fell. Robin leapt to catch him. She managed to cushion his fall, though the move sent them both to the ground.

They lay winded a moment in a tangled pile of limbs. Then the boy began to squirm. He smacked Robin in the face, lurched to his feet, barely missed kicking her in the stomach, and ran straight into Tisha, who caught him by the elbows and held fast.

“Hey, hey!” she soothed, folding the kid into something that might have been a hug, if it weren’t so purposefully restraining. It even pinned his hands under his own arms, which kept him from using his power. “Listen, kiddo—”

“Lightboy.”

Robin rolled her eyes. “This isn’t a game.”

“Are you stupid? It’s the best game.”

“Not anymore.”

Robin reached passed Tisha to grab the kid’s arm. He’d caught it on the edge of the fire escape when he fell, leaving a long but shallow gash. She curled her fingers into it and squeezed until it drew a wince from the boy.

“You feel that? It hurts. Does the game hurt like that?” She dropped it, with perhaps a bit more force than needed. “Those punks could’ve stabbed you. You could’ve broken your neck. And even if you came back, which you might not, it’d still hurt like hell on the way down. Is that what you want?”

“Robin,” Tisha hissed in a low admonition. Robin scowled, but took the scolding for what it was and backed off. Tisha turned the no-longer-wriggling boy around to face her, took his injured arm, and rubbed it soothingly as she checked for damage. “She’s not mad, just worried. It’s not safe to be out alone after dark, even for great heroes.”

“You’re alone,” muttered the kid.

“I most certainly am not. I’ve got Robin with me. And she’s got me.” Tisha kept her tone light and unthreatening, almost like the host on a kid’s TV show. It seemed to hold the boy’s attention if nothing else. “Don’t you have anyone to watch your back while you’re playing? Your dad, maybe?”

“My dad’s dead.”

Robin and Tisha shared a simultaneous full-body cringe. Lightboy barely noticed, though he started fiddling with the knot in his makeshift cape.

“Casey got the game ages and ages ago but he never plays it. He spent all that money on a VRPC and only uses it to watch stupid kissing movies.”

Robin swallowed her disgust. Consumer-grade virtual reality had been the door to many things, including a whole new world of porn. Not that she could judge anyone for indulging in that, but at least keep it away from the kids.

“So who cares if I borrow it sometimes? At least I play the game right.”

The crease between Tisha’s eyebrows grew deeper. “Casey is…?”

“Mom’s boyfriend.”

“And your mom?”

“She doesn’t play games.”

Tisha hummed and met Robin’s eye. Robin returned a single nod. The kid was truly on his own, so their consciences wouldn’t let them do anything else.

“How about you run with us for a while?” Tisha offered. “We can be a team.”

And get a roof over our heads, Robin thought. With the kid’s eight levels, they’d only need one more between them to get an apartment. Three people in an unfurnished studio would be crowded, but it was better than sleeping on the streets.

The kid, seeming to calm now that he couldn’t run, screwed up his face as though considering the offer. Before he could respond, a riotous laugh cut him off.

“Well well well well well. What do we have here?”

 

---

 

Robin moved first, pulling Tisha and the kid behind her. The sun had set as they’d been talking, leaving only the bulb over a locked delivery entrance to light their dead-end.

Into the edge of the light strode the tallest of five men, the one who had spoken. His companions formed a line behind him. The four wore animal masks — those of a lion, a pig, a bear and a cow — and were otherwise in nondescript street clothes. Their leader wore a burnt orange suit with a “tattered finery” cosmetic, giving it the appearance of age over its hideously clashing purple vest. His hair was a scraggly blue, gelled almost straight back at the temples, and his “mask” was white make-up smeared by a rictus red grin.

“Looks like this is our lucky day, boys. Five minutes into the hunt and we’ve found ourselves some friends.”

Robin smothered a groan. These guys were no NPCs. The head asshole was a goddamn clown, one of the TooEdgy4U teenagers or man-children who loved to cackle about watching the world burn. There was no officially-sanctioned way to play a villain in The Golden Age — the developers had to hit their limit somewhere — but there were paths for anti-heroes that hinged on developing a bad reputation, and some players reveled in the challenge of pushing that karma system to its limits. Mostly, by harassing newbies out of the game-masters’ sight.

Now there were no game-masters, and the clowns had come out to play.

“You little chickies should know better than to be out after dark. It’s so dangerous, you’ve got no idea what you might be walking into.”

Christ, how long had he rehearsed this spiel? Robin snorted. “Whatever, troll.”

“We don’t want any trouble,” said Tisha quickly, shooting a nervous glance between Robin and the clown, whose smile had dropped now that he glared daggers. She pulled Lightboy against her and tucked his head protectively into her side. “We were just leaving, so we’ll clear out of your way…”

The clown cut her off with another high-pitched giggle, one so throughly designed to be creepy and off-putting that he had to have practiced it. After a hesitant second, one of his goons joined in, soon followed by the other three.

“Oh come now, don’t be so unfriendly. If you’ve wandered off from the Park’s safety you must be at least as curious as we are about the limits of our new world. We’re only looking to explore that together.”

He spoke the way old comics were lettered, with words emphasized almost at random. As he talked, he plucked a switchblade from the pocket of his vest and flicked it open. He took a slow, ominous step forward and his flunkies followed suit, closing them in.

Robin slid back half a step. There was only ten feet to the dead-end’s brick wall. The sooner they moved, the better chance they’d have to break through; but they had to time it just right.

“Let’s say we start with how many hit-points a noob looses each time we cut off a finger. Or maybe your nose!”

He lunged, blade arcing in an up-swing that would’ve caught Robin across the chest if she hadn’t jumped back. It clipped her hoodie instead. She caught the wrist, using it to yank the clown forward into a torso-punch, and shouted, “Lightboy, now!”

The kid took her meaning, splaying his fingers and releasing the blinding flash. The four animal-masked goons yelled in surprise, reeling back from where they’d begun to close in. Robin put her shoulder into a body check, forcing the clown back until they broke through his masked ranks.

She pulled back, kicked at his stomach and yelled, “Run!”

Tisha grabbed the kid and dove through the gap between assailants. The blinded goons grasped for her but missed, catching no more than her cape for a split second before it — and she — slipped through their grasp. She banked around Robin’s fight and spirited Lightboy out of the goons’ reach.

Robin twisted to follow, only to be yanked back. The clown had dropped his knife into the other hand and turned her grip around so he now grasped her wrist instead. He yanked her against him, brought his other arm across her chest, and slashed into the meat of her shoulder.

A scream cracked Robin’s throat. The knife was dull and rusted. It ripped rather than cut.

Distantly, she heard Tisha shouting her name and bellowed back, “Just go!”

She drove her elbow again and again into the clown’s stomach, with all the force she could muster. He didn’t even wince. He only laughed before kicking her in the backside, which flung her into the brick wall. Her head connected with a sickening thump. Robin saw stars.

Before she knew it, two animal-masked goons — the pig and the bear — had her by the arms and slammed her onto her back in a wrestling move made real. Though dazed and winded, she twisted against them, to no avail. The clown kept right on chuckling as he stepped over her stomach and sat down, pinning her torso to the hard concrete.

“First blood, first kill,” he chuckled, and drove the switchblade into the side of her throat.

It was the worst physical pain Robin had ever felt. Worse than the broken arm when she was ten. Worse than the fractured ankle at sixteen. It might even be worse than what she’d felt the last time she spoke with her parents, if only because it came all at once instead of festering over days.

Blood — far more blood and gore than The Golden Age had ever shown — sprayed the clown’s gaudy tuxedo. His grin matched his mask as he drove the knife in, inch by shallow, ripping inch.

She couldn’t survive this. There was no way.

She was going to die.

“The name’s Delirious Ramesses,” whispered her murderer, so low that only she could hear. “Spread it around.”

And then, with thick, meaty rip, she knew only back.